"I don't really think it has ever been much of a moat. There are many viable alternatives. I used duckduckgo as my default, and have for years, because I am not fond of Google's invasive monetization of everything you do. Its results are generally acceptable, and about 5% of the time when it is not cutting it, I'll open a new tab for the root google.com and search that way. Before Google, yahoo worked just fine, and if you want to go back to the early 90s, we used to search the text based web with a text based browser called Lynx...also just fine. I also don't use Chrome and almost never need it as Safari renders almost all pages just fine.

Google searches and indexes your gmail as well, to include contents of messages. That should send you chills. If you want actual security, try proton mail."

I totally understand your points about the invasive monetization and privacy but for me that is an issue across all tech. It is beyond egregious and we as society have just ceded it away with nary so much as a fight. I am hopeful it will get dialed back eventually but unfortunately I believe it would take something really bad for that to happen and of course that's never a good thing.

With that said, that monetization is a huge part of the moat. There are so many businesses that are literally dependent on the Google advertising ecosphere for survival. I work for an international supplier of above ground pools. When it comes to internet sales (which is increasingly a big part of our business, nearly 50%) I would say all of our customers and partners are completely reliant on Google in some fashion or another. Their hooks are deep, and I don't mean that in a sinister way, they just make it easy to advertise and market a product. Recently there's been a lot of discussion about how the business is transferring to AI search and the fact is- it is not (yet). You can ask more specific questions and probably get a detailed answer like "I have bunions, should I buy Nike or New Balance shoes?" and the machine will read reviews and articles online and spit out a good answer but that's not advertising. And then the question becomes, if you are advertising in an AI search are you not corrupting what should be considered incorruptable to begin with? In other words, If a search is giving you an advertisement it's not Artificial Intelligence at that point. I've heard many a presentation about shifting from straight search to AI search and I still have no idea what the person is talking about at the end. That doesn't mean what they're saying is not good information because I am admittedly very slow on the uptake of these things but I don't see any transition taking place yet.

And finally, for purposes of this post I searched it- "68% to 70% of the global web browser market share across all devices. While browser usage stats are tracked globally, the exact percentage of all global internet searches performed specifically inside Chrome isn't isolated into a single official public metric, but Google's search engine itself handles about 91.4% of the world's search engine market." I got that straight from the incorruptable Google machine:-) It seems like a pretty strong moat.